Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet - Sarah Elton

There has been much talk recently about what the world will be like in 2050. Speculation on a future economy in a world of nine billion people, how we will deal with decreasing oil and natural gas reserves, and the effects of climate change top the list for most people. Author Sarah Elton, in her book Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet, combines all of these – along with increased urbanization – to ask the question: how will the world feed itself in 2050?

Today’s industrial food system is affected by everything on this list. Elton argues that in order to best use the finite resources available to us, we need to find alternatives to the industrial food system that are sustainable, based in ethics and human rights, and maintain ecological balance. She outlines a decade by decade set of targets to be met which she believes is the path that will lead us to food security.

Elton travels to India where she meets with organic farmer Chandrakala Bobade, who epitomizes the first decade’s target: ending industrial farming and making agricultural systems sustainable. Many of India’s farmers are in crisis. They are indebted to companies from which they purchase expensive inputs for their crops – fertilizers, seeds – yet the returns are too little to pay for the next round of inputs. Thousands of farmers commit suicide each week as their farms fail. Others, like Bobade, have decided to go organic and cut out the expensive fertilizers and seeds. They have been successful, increased yields, run successful farmers’ markets, and shown that organic farming can feed a country the size of India.

Elton interviews Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, professor of rural studies at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who believes industrial agriculture is “on its death bed” as it does not pay farmers sufficiently to grow food and is environmentally damaging. In his opinion, the small-scale farming model followed by Bobade and others will become the norm. However, Elton argues that this transformation must also include a move away from a farm system based on created cheap, processed food that results in further depressed farm workers’ wages. Instead, says Elton, there need to be localized markets for food so that people have “a real choice about what to eat and the right to choose food grown in a particular way”.

Farmland itself is under pressure as governments and developers snap up whatever acres they can grab – forests, wetlands, farms – to build industrial parks and housing developments, or to plant cash crops for biofuels and the export market. Countries like India are buying up land in Burma, Kenya and Ethiopia to grow the food it needs as it paves over its own farmland. In a world suffering the effects of climate change, Elton states that sustainable agriculture would have farmland near to the urban markets needing the food and governments should be actively protecting it instead of opening it up to speculators waiting for a food crisis.

Elton’s second decade target is to ensure food security through diversity in the seed supply. While in China, she visits a remote Hani village that farms local rice varieties in terraced paddies irrigated by a stream dammed with rocks, the soil worked by animals and birds. Each rice variety is adapted to the local microclimate and is resistant to local pests. At one point centuries ago, this mountainous landscape supported over ten thousand hectares of rice paddies and in the 14^th century it was known as the Eastern Grain Barn.

Pressures on farmers even in this corner of China mean they are foregoing planting traditional rice varieties, instead using the high-yielding hybrid rice varieties. These new varieties are not well adapted, requiring fertilizers and pesticides that harm the fish and ducks that help keep the paddies healthy, as well as the wild foods once gathered. Not saving seeds mean that the genetic material within them is lost forever, and the diversity within food crops diminishes. Lower genetic diversity means that crops will be more susceptible to increased levels of carbon dioxide or certain pests because there are fewer genes to recombine to find a vigorous one that will survive.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 75 percent of crop diversity was lost in the 20^th century. India in the 1950s could boast thirty thousand wild varieties of rice; by 2015 is it likely that number will have dropped to 50 wild varieties. North America 50 years ago had multitudes of varieties of apples, but today most grocery stores carry only a few varieties year round. Food supply is closely tied to the diversity of the gene pool in the seeds of wheat, rice, corn and other crops.

For Elton, it is in the best interest of human survival that seed banks continue to collect seeds, and publically-supported research continues into development of crop varieties able to survive the conditions predicted in a globally warmed future world. While Elton does not come out fully against genetically modified seeds, she does say that patented seed technologies hinder gains and the free exchange of scientific research into new varieties is necessary.

The third target Elton outlines is more difficult to pin down, but hearkens back to a time when societies were less urbanized and “more connected” to nature. European countries like France still show this trend, though it too is struggling against the “modernization” of food culture. Monsieur Valadier is a 78 year old cattle farmer who never gave up the traditional peasant life of the mountainous Aubrac region, where they kept the cows and continued to make the famous Laguiole cheese used in the traditional dish aligot. Elton writes of the food grown in a certain region as having a terroir – a unique taste created by the air, water and soil. It is these things that connect people to the land around them.

However, “cultures of food are eroding” as urbanites do not experience this same close connection, instead learning the taste of the supermarkets with their pre-roasted chickens and boxes of salad mix. Price and convenience are more important in busy lives than taste and nutrition. The danger, says researcher Harry Balzer, is that food habits learned at a young age are difficult to change later in life. Basically, he says, growing up on a diet of processed foods means it will likely be in your diet as an adult. Reconnecting with the terroir of locally purchased and “home-cooked” foods may be what is needed to raise a generation concerned about the farmland that sustains them and wanting to take part in the process.

To achieve this requires a food production revolution. It may take Elton’s many urban gardens, small organic farms run by peasant farmers, seed banks and culture-awakening terroir. It may take and entire change to the economic system. What is obvious is that tying food and food production into the current system has been a disaster, leading to price fluctuations in staples, increased poverty as farmers are driven off their land by corporations, and environmental degradation. The ideas in this book are good starting point for the changes needed as we move towards 2050.

This review was previously published here: http://www.socialist.ca/node/1797

Locavore: from farmers’ fields to rooftop gardens – how Canadians are changing the way we eat - Sarah Elton

Sugary processed foods full of cheap calories linked to increasing rates of obesity and diabetes. Fruits and vegetables whose durability for traveling long distances is more important than their flavour and nutrition. The environmental cost of using fossil fuels to ship food worldwide. The ability to provide food security to a population. These are a few of the issues Sarah Elton explores in her book Locavore as she argues for sustainable local food systems.

It was a plastic-wrapped pig cookie covered in pink icing with the words “Made in China” at the end of its list of ingredients that led Elton to question just what was happening to Canada’s food supply system. While thousands of Canadians accept that year round there will be all types of exotic fruits and vegetables in the stores, she found it disturbing that foods were being imported that could be easily made locally.

Elton began asking questions and got some surprising statistics in return. Newfoundland grows less than 10 percent of what it eats. Vancouver Island used to produce 85 percent of the food it needed, but that has dropped to 10 percent as well. Industrial agriculture has allowed a modern farm to, per hour of labour, produce 350 times more food than a subsistence farmer would have produced on the same soils. A large amount of the food that feeds Canadians is imported because it is cheaper to produce elsewhere.

Elton argues that every country should be able to feed itself through a sustainable local food system, arguing: “Drought in some parts of the world is devastating crops, while storms cause extreme flooding in other regions. If turbulent weather or a severe drought caused grain or rice crops to fail around the world, millions of us would starve.” She also questions what would happen if trade routes were to shut down due to war, environmental destruction, or petroleum shortages and rising transport costs.

One issue Canada would face in a local food system is climate. Elton visited what she calls “four-season farms” in Ontario where many farmers are innovating greenhouse agriculture. Greenhouses can be incredibly productive, producing 600 000 pounds of food per acre per year when a single outdoor acre will produce 90 percent less food since it can only produce one crop a season. While greenhouses use a lot of energy for grow lights, the majority of the energy demand is for heat – the energy coming primarily from electricity or coal. Some local greenhouse farmers have found that they can reduce the need for electricity or fertilizer inputs for their crops simply by changing planting times, developing hardy varieties, and using innovative methods such as aquaponics (combining fish farms and greenhouse gardens) which both conserves water and provides nutrient inputs for the crops.

Mike Shreiner, leader of Ontario’s Green Party and sustainable food system advocate, says, “We have the technology and the capacity to operate greenhouses in environmentally friendly ways. Now, whether the marketplace allows us to do it on a cost basis is to be seen.” The vagaries of the economy is always a major risk, and, as Elton points out, “no greenhouse is sustainable unless it is economically viable” so as long as imported produce stays so cheap, Canadian greenhouse growers have little chance of contributing to a local food system.

It is this same market system that put pressure on Canadian farms in the 1970s and 1980s as first the oil crisis and then a glut in the world food market meant that farms were no longer making enough money to pay the debts incurred as they rushed to expand the size of their farms during the boom years. Thousands of farmers went bankrupt, and farming in Canada never recovered. Farming is no longer the profitable industry it once was, and fewer are entering the profession today. There are fewer farmers than ever trying to feed the largest urban populations ever. Those who have stayed in farming are forced to become innovative business thinkers, and are finding ways to be successful enough to continue.

Donald and Viola Daigle are from New Brunswick and their family farm is part of the Really Local Harvest Co-op, which has been credited with saving many farms in the area. As farmers struggled to find stores and restaurants to stock their produced, often selling at a loss, a group decided to work together (instead of competing) to sell their crops directly to the consumer. The co-op developed a mandate whereby members assist each other to increase profits while selling an ecologically sustainable product at a fair price. As well, no member farmer is permitted to sell at a loss. Over time, the co-op’s success grew as the community realized they were getting a better product from the local farmers than the non-local produce at the stores: it was higher quality, better tasting, and that made it worth the extra cost.

Larry Yee of the Association of Family Farms in California describes organizations like the Really Local Harvest Co-op as attaching worth to qualities beyond money, “You are producing a different food product that has qualities people are looking for.” Elton argues that food is a personal issue and “by making consumer choices that support the creation of a sustainable local food economy, we are helping to create solutions” and perhaps to “create a new food order”.

It might seem simple enough to “vote with our forks” but the effect this has on the global system of industrial agriculture is small. There is nothing wrong with Elton’s advice to shop from farmers markets from local farmers, to buy organic and fair trade, or even to simply avoid purchasing processed foods. However, these cannot be the only thing people do, and are often only possible by those with higher incomes anyway. Buying flour made from locally grown grain will not stop the worldwide overproduction of grain, nor will buying locally grown corn stop the proliferation of processed foods made from the excess corn. As long as farmers must continue to struggle to make a profit it is unlikely that a truly sustainable food system can be developed. That said, Elton’s book is engaging and readable, and gives hope and ideas for the future of the world’s food systems.